4.19.2010

Paging Dr. Herbert West

So, I finally finished that Women record. It took way longer than it should have, mostly because I was dragging my feet and wildly distracted by the weather. I'm pretty pleased with how it came out. I used Microns to ink it instead of the brush I usually use, and while I definitely prefer the way my brush lines look, I needed to use pens for this because it was so much work and I drew it at such a large scale and pens are much faster (and reproduce a little better). I also used Photoshop, which I hate, to add the color because I understand that a true solid color reproduces much better in limited color printing, and I wanted to make things easier in that respect. I'm the first to admit when I'm being a stubborn cavewoman, and I can see how using photoshop for a few things can make it way more usable and printable. But man, I feel so much better when I'm actually painting something with my hands, and I feel like everything I personally do looks better when done by hand.I'm actually really excited about how the back cover came out design wise and once again was excited to draw those tails.I'm also pretty pleased with the lettering, which was basically what I did on the labels. It's supposed to look hairy. I really like doing hand lettering, though it can be frustrating and there's lots of room for stupid and hard to correct misspellings and errors (zack's "birtday" card is a very good example of this haha)

And here's a close up of a screaming rat face!Oh and a word about the theme: after a lot of back and forth and changes of ideas the band wanted to do something Re-animator themed, with a dead rat and a syringe full of the green reanimation fluid (though I think the rat is actually from Beyond Re-animator) . I was delighted because I like rats and drawing rats (and anything gross with a million tiny hairs) and I love horror movies. The back cover and the labels were sort of vaguelyrat king related. The sewn together rats on the front were an idea I had that came from a couple sources. Inspired in part by the mouse with a human ear grown on it, in part by the death of Chang and Eng, and also by an account in Stiff by Mary Roach, in which she describes a series of experiments where the head of a dead dog was transplanted onto a living dog and supplied oxygenated blood before brain death could occur. The transplanted head lived (for a couple days or weeks in different instances) an obviously tragic and confused existence on the live dog, and they occasionally even bit each other. Aside from that being an incredibly cruel account of Mengele-esque animal torture, it's a really good example of modern science falling squarely in line with true mad science. That is definitely an experiment Dr. Herbert West would have done.

I got started on the the Laurel Hill project immediately after finishing this one. It's basically a race against time at this point! 10 days to finish!!!

Apparently that scientist did dog head experiments for a while and never figured out how to segue his discovery into anything useful. I guess the drugs he would have needed to fight infection and rejection of the new heads didn't exist yet so he just shut down shop. "hey remember those ten years where I sewed dead dog heads onto live dogs? that was weird!"

also I was looking at your stuff today and I really love that quarter sleeve that went onto the guys neck with the crow and fire and skull? awesome.

is that dog head thing the same as the zombie dogs [not the rad band] video on youtube? that's messed up too!

these however are not messed up, they are freakin sick! i just watched "from beyond" the other day which isn't really associated with the reanimator series aside from having "beyond" in the title and some of the same cast members, including "dr. west" as it were...but still pretty great.

this must have taken you a while to deal with the rats' hair with just microns! or were you using micron brush pens on that bit?

great work! i just did an ode to some horror movie characters for my buddy's "bloody good horror: podcast, i love doing the "research" for these kinds of things and watching these great movies again!

From Beyond is associated with Reanimator in my mind because they have the same director and are both "adaptations" of h.p. lovecraft stories. looooooooooooooose adaptations haha trust me, I am always always always "researching" with movies and comics.

I just used a big pile of .01's since they CONSTANTLY crap out. wtf micron?! for some reason inking with a pen goes so much faster for me though I 100% prefer a brush. Maybe its the paint dipping time? I had not considered a brush pen!